View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Water, Development, and Nature in Korea: Struggling towards Sustainability Gavan McCormack Traditional Korea, like Edo period Japan, gave highest priority to avoiding growth or change. Frugality, recycling, and avoidance of waste were fundamental, local communities functioned as sustainable ecological units, meeting energy requirements from the adjacent forests and recycling wastes so as not to pollute the rivers and ground-water.1) Renewable energy, recycling of materials, and zero waste were the principles that underpinned the balance between human society and nature, and that balance was sustainable, and it was indeed sustained until the fabric of the East Asian order was torn apart and re-assembled during the tumultuous nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite the convulsions at the level of the state and the global system, the old order of Korean rural society only slowly declined. Late in the nineteenth century it was convulsed in rebellion, but before any revolutionary transformation could take place, the national subjugation under Japan began. The impact of Japanese colonialism (1910-1945) on the physical environment was dramatic. With the dramatic rise in population came urbanization, road, rail and harbour, infrastructural development, large-scale land reclamation and a measure of industrialization. However, the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945, followed shortly afterwards by the Korean War (1950- 1953), saw the country devastated, set back by decades. When a regime committed to development as a national strategy was installed in 1961, it had to begin from something like a clean slate. Developmentalism then washed over Korea in a long, tumultuous and all- enveloping wave that reached every corner of the country, through military dictatorship and democratic regime alike, until the system foundered in crisis and near collapse in 1997. Under its influence, frugality and resource conservation turned to wastefulness and resource exploitation; the constraints of nature were rudely set aside. Mobilization of people and resources for growth became the national religion. In the span of a mere three decades, Korea was transformed from agrarian to industrial society, its economy lifted from sub-Saharan African levels to Asian ‘Tiger’ status. During the period 1963 to 1990, relentless growth maximization policies were pursued by a dedicated group of technocrats, first under the military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee (which brooked criticism or opposition from neither capitalist nor worker) and then under various regimes during the transition to democracy. GDP over these almost three decades grew at an average annual rate of 8.8 per cent.2) Such was the social commitment to growth that few questioned the appropriations from nature, especially of the marine and mountain environment, or the onslaught on 111 nature by the virtually unfettered release of industrial, household, and agricultural wastes into air, rivers, soil and sea. Only the steady worsening of living conditions and spread of environmental pollution-related illnesses from the 1970s, and the slow maturation of civil society and transition to democracy, especially after 1987, served to rein in the frenzy for development. In the 1990s came the call to count the cost and weigh options for the future.3) The bureaucrats who presided over the development ‘miracle’ were heavily influenced by Japanese models, not only that of Japan as it achieved industrialization and its equally ‘miraculous’ growth in the 1960s but also by its earlier model of prewar growth, especially as presented by the phenomenon of industrialization in the 1930s ‘puppet’ state of Manchukuo. From 1972 they adopted the ‘Comprehensive National Territorial Plan’ [Kukt’o chonghap kihoek] as the master-plan for harnessing the natural environment, based on the Japanese Zenst. 4) The fourth such Plan was adopted in January 2000, as the masterplan for the two decades to 2020.5) By the time the crisis of 1997 struck, Korean per capita GDP had risen to around 10,000 dollars and many began to long for a relaxation in the frenzied pace of industrialization so that its fruits might be enjoyed and its costs reassessed. It was time, in that view, to end the ‘develop-at-all-costs-ism’ and seek a sustainable path, in harmony with nature rather than at odds with it.6) The developmental blueprint, however, remained in place, with plans for trebling GDP over the coming two decades, which would mean also trebling energy demand, industrial waste output and CO2 emissions, turning much of the country’s remaining mud-flats on the West coast into farm, factory, or town site land, building 50 more nuclear power stations (to add to the 12 already functioning) and nearly trebling the number of large large, multi-purpose dams (from 12 to 32) over the same span.7) Financial factors were undoubtedly paramount in the crash of 1997, but the underlying crisis was of a more fundamental order. The process of rethinking the meaning of growth, and indeed the meaning of life, was stimulated in Korea as elsewhere by the evidence of the fragility of the system as a whole.8) Yet the crisis, as Han notes, seems to have had the effect of pushing the Korean leadership away from their tentative ventures along the sustainability path and back to ‘productivity, competitiveness, recovery, growth, and jobs’.9) There are large political, economic, and social issues at stake here, but in this essay we are concerned primarily with the footprint of development on the Korean natural environment, especially with rivers (and their mountain watersheds) and coast. Korea is a narrow peninsula, two-thirds mountainous and forested, with many short, fast- flowing rivers and a jagged, island-studded coastline. The exploitation of nature, including the rivers and coast, for food (irrigation), energy, transportation and town- water was kept up during the great rush to development. Large dams and reclamation works played a central role, as elsewhere in the world, as symbols of modernity and science. By 1986, Korea, with an area equal to that of the single US state of Ohio, had 690 large dams, ranking No. 7 in global terms.10) There were few places to which the hand of development had not reached, and they were either remote mountain areas or the coastline, especially to the south-west. Even in these areas, the process of transition from the bio-diverse realm of nature to a complex of highly engineered and controlled 112 human facilities, resting on concrete foundations, seemed to have an unstoppable momentum. Three projects are here considered here: the Tong River dam, the Shihwa and Saemangu˘ m wetlands reclamation projects, and the various Imjin River (and DMZ) development projects. 1. Tong River Korea enjoys a rainfall that is relatively high by world standards (its annual precipitation of 1,283 mms puts it at 30 per cent above the global average), but it is concentrated in certain periods, especially the summer monsoon, and when calculated in terms of ‘preserved amounts’ of water per head of population the figure falls to only 10 per cent of the global average.11) Two-thirds of it falls during the summer monsoon season. For UN purposes, Korea is a ‘water stress’ country, its degree of shortage officially declared to be as chronic and serious as anywhere in the Asia-Pacific with the exception of Singapore.12) The Korean government predicts that demand will outrun supply by 2011, and recurrent droughts in the years spanning the transition between the centuries suggested that even that might be optimistic.13) By 1990, 10 major multi- purpose dams sat astride Korea’s main rivers (plus one estuary dyke on the Naktong River), and the government was committed to building many more.14) Its 1995 plan envisaged an additional 28 multi-purpose dams to be in service by the year 2011, 6 of which were already under construction.15) Seoul, from a small town with a population of less than three hundred thousand people early in the twentieth century grew to a massive conurbation of 18 million by the 1990s.16) At the mouth of the Han River, it faced problems of pollution, flooding —— due to the violent summer storms that sent torrents of water crashing down from upstream mountain areas —— and diminishing reserves of town water. Following severe floods in September 1990 (400 mms in 3 days) in which many lives were lost and property damage was immense, a debate opened on a possible dam on the Tong River, a turbulent, upstream tributary running through limestone karst, feeding into the Han River several hundred kilometres east of the capital in Kangwo˘ n province. The Tong is only 51 kilometres long and much of it so remote as to be inaccessible by road. In 1997 the Ministry of Construction and Transport’s design for the Dam was adopted by cabinet. The projected dam, at its site, a place called Yo˘ ngwo˘ l about 200 kilometres southwest of Seoul, would involve a 98 metres high retaining wall, 325 metres in width, holding back a reservoir of 690 million tons of water, forcing the evacuation of some 526 households and submerging villages to 52 kilometres upstream from the site. Its primary purpose was to solve the flooding problem, but it would also generate 19,600 KW of electricity and contribute to the supply of town water to the Seoul city area.17) Prior to the 1990s, once such a plan had been commissioned by the water bureaucrats and adopted in cabinet, the dam would have been constructed without further delay. This plan, however, came just three years after the revolutionary transformations of 1987, in which the military dictatorship was overthrown by burgeoning civil society movements, and those movements quickly spread from the narrow political focus on regime to environmental and quality of life matters.